Each year, September is “Pain Awareness Month” – a time of intense activity for PREP faculty and the entire pain community It is also when PREP’s academic year begins. One key insight connects diverse Pain Awareness activities and PREP’s own vision and mission: PAIN IS A PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE, AND PAIN EDUCATION IS A PUBLIC HEALTH IMPERATIVE. Now is a perfect time to step back and place some context around this idea at the heart of not only PREP’s curriculum, but also our entire approach to interprofessional education.

The report issued by the Institute of Medicine earlier this summer – “Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education and Research” (ref 1) — is the latest in a series of white papers on pain by governmental and professional groups dating back well over two decades. These include the first US federal clinical practice guideline (ref 2) on any topic, numerous international guidelines (ref 3), and white papers from authoritative sources such as the Mayday Fund (ref 4), the American Academy of Pain Medicine (ref 5), and even the World Health Organization (ref 6). Together, they present steadily accumulating evidence that acute, chronic and cancer-related pain are widely prevalent and exact a major economic and human burden in developed nations and even more so in resource-poor countries. Other common themes include lost opportunities for early intervention to control or prevent the transition from acute to chronic pain, the negative outcomes of undertreated pain, the importance of optimal pain control for patient-centered care, disparities in pain assessment and treatment experienced by minorities and other under-represented groups such as women or those at the extremes of age, and the need “to adopt a population-level prevention and management strategy” (ref 1) for pain. Related to all these is the growing perspective that pain control is a fundamental human right (ref 7) as articulated by Human Rights Watch (ref 8 ) and recently affirmed in the 2010 Declaration of Montreal by delegates to the International Pain Summit (ref 9).

Since its inception in 1999, the Tufts program on pain research, education and policy has been housed in its Department of Public Health and Community Medicine. Although the pain community has long held a consensus that pain is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, most prestigious journal articles and a majority of research funding have emphasized the “bio” end of that word. Thus, the classical Loeser model of pain originates in subcellular nociceptive machinery, then broadens to encompass the experiences of pain and suffering, followed by pain behavior. The Loeser model is an intrinsically individual one.

(Fig 1. Loeser Model used with permission of Professor John Loeser)

Our program’s framing of pain employs a sociobiological perspective, in keeping with our having been co-founded by a PhD sociologist, Kathy Lasch. Those individuals better able to detect and remember threats to their survival have better odds of propagating their DNA within the collective gene pool. Indeed, within Darwin’s (and more recently, Dawkins’s) “selfish gene” framework, individuals are mere vessels through which genes propagate themselves (ref 10). Whether or not we agree with this view, it sets the stage for interesting discussion by shifting our reference frame to a distinctly supraindividual model of pain. According to PREP’s social model, the experience of pain is still at the core, but to understand it requires research that goes beyond the individual. In human society, research is lost if not translated into education – particularly one that embraces the intersubjective, social and emotional nature of the pain experience. We at PREP are committed to interprofessional education of pain leaders as the most effective way to effect social change – a commitment that led to our program’s specific acknowledgment in the IOM report in its chapter 4, on education. Among recent PREP graduates and applicants we are beginning to see a few exceptional persons who have chosen to spend their careers as policymakers in the important field of pain. I am delighted to see this, because the continuous translation of the benefits of research and education requires ongoing support through enlightened, population-based health policies.

Discussion about international collaboration between Xiaoshu Zhu (University of Western Sydney, Australia), Ewan McNichol (PREP program faculty, TUSM) and MS-PREP program graduate and acupuncturist, Kindreth Hamilton